Published on August 26, 2019. This article introduces Masayuki Takayama’s latest book and discusses the Asahi Shimbun’s correction demands, Honda Katsuichi’s Travels in China, the “hundred-man killing” report, the so-called mass graves at Fushun, the poison-gas photograph issue, and the narcissism and abnormal reactions of Asahi reporters, while examining the newspaper’s tendency not to hesitate to lie and its commonality with China and the Korean Peninsula.

August 26, 2019.
Their defining characteristic is, above all, that “they do not hesitate to lie.”
In this respect as well, the Asahi Shimbun, China, and the Korean Peninsula probably have something in common.
Those who have purchased the following latest book by Masayuki Takayama will surely recognize once again that Masayuki Takayama is, as I have said, the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
A reader friend of mine said that when he recommended the book to a university student among his relatives, he was surprised to be told, just from looking at the title, that it was “biased.”
Regarding that, I attached a photograph of his latest book.
I replied that this is probably because, among those teaching as professors at Japanese universities, there are not only a considerable number of leftist childish-disease patients, but, incredibly, countless types such as Korean and Chinese professors.
Indeed, Japanese universities are exposed to compound pollution.
Laughs.
Answering the Asahi Shimbun’s “protest.”
The Asahi Shimbun came protesting, with veins bulging at its temples, that there were “mistakes” and that I should “correct them” in “Orifushi no Ki” in the December 2017 issue of Sound Argument.
There were as many as fifteen points in just over two pages.
It apparently wanted to say that the piece was full of mistakes, but there were no particular errors.
Then, in the written request, it added the threatening words that it would “post it on Asahi.com and expose it to the world.”
In fact, there was also a similar correction request concerning the column I serialize in Shukan Shincho, and there too it said it would “post it on Asahi.com.”
It is truly distressing to be complained to in such a way.
Even though I may not look it, I read the Asahi Shimbun, which nobody reads, quite carefully.
I am a good reader.
People say, with loose tongues, that I “make a living off Asahi material,” but that is not so.
If there was something strange, I pointed it out in my column, but I did so hoping it would become an opportunity for them to recover.
I wanted them to think of it as a whip of love.
However, looking at this written request, it seems they still have not recovered.
One of the correction demands concerns the passage “the figure of cursing Abe.”
Asahi articles overflow with feelings of hatred toward Abe.
If someone who did not know read them, an abnormality would seep through so strongly that he would think, “Is the Asahi performing a curse ritual at the hour of the ox?”
Although I pointed that out, the Asahi says it is “wrong” because “we are not cursing him.”
It is like saying, “Your mother has a protruding navel,” and receiving the reply, “My mother does not have a protruding navel.”
It is not normal.
The person who wrote it was the public-relations department chief.
I hear that he used to be a reporter in the judicial press club.
I hear that he was a normal person at that time, but the wording does not make one feel any normality.
It is as if something possessed him.
To tell the truth, from the time I joined the Sankei Shimbun half a century ago, I had vaguely felt that Asahi Shimbun reporters had that kind of abnormality.
Not long after I moved up to the city desk, I saw a colleague who had joined the company at the same time as me at a reporting site.
“Hey, O,” I called out to him.
He replied as follows.
“I have moved to the Asahi Shimbun.
Now I am an Asahi reporter.
You and I are no longer colleagues who joined at the same time.
From now on, would you call me with ‘san’ attached?”
For an instant, I doubted his mental state.
I wondered whether it was the intense narcissism seen in psychopaths, or antisocial personality disorder, but his eyes were not wandering.
After that too, in press clubs and elsewhere, I several times saw Asahi reporters arrogantly lean back and say, “Who do you think I am?”
It looked like narcissism similar to O’s, but is that something that infects people?
When I became interested and observed Asahi reporters, there were several abnormal symptoms not found at other companies.
The following is a pathological analysis of Asahi Shimbun reporters conducted over half a century.
Their defining characteristic is, above all, that “they do not hesitate to lie.”
In this respect as well, the Asahi Shimbun, China, and the Korean Peninsula probably have something in common.
Honda Katsuichi is a good example.
In 1972, Showa 47, he wrote Travels in China.
Its contents are nothing but lies.
He had Chinese people say that the “hundred-man killing” created by Asami Kazuo of the Mainichi Shimbun was a true story.
The so-called mass graves at Fushun, where “weakened Chinese laborers were buried alive in holes,” were a lie created by the Chinese, but Honda printed it without checking.
In Honda’s collected works, there is a photograph of a Japanese soldier with two chickens hanging from his neck, with the caption “goats, chickens, and the like were looted everywhere.”
However, this photograph is one from the Asahi’s Pictorial Report on the China Incident, and its explanatory caption says, “A soldier advancing while hanging chickens bought at a Chinese private house, photographed by special correspondent Ogawa.”
Honda probably found this photograph in his company’s archive room and rewrote only the caption.
It is good evidence that Honda did not hesitate to lie.
Editorial writer Yotsukura Motoki followed Honda’s example and wrote “Travels in the Philippines.”
In one part, “The Journey to Leyte Island,” September 18, 2010, Francisco Diaz, then ninety-five years old, appears.
Diaz says that during the war he was struck with a gun by a Japanese soldier, and Yotsukura writes that he “rubbed a fist-sized lump on the back of his neck,” saying, “This lump was formed at that time.”
He even kindly attaches a color photograph of the lump.
Anyone can see that it is a lipoma.
But Yotsukura says it is a lump that remained swollen even sixty years later.
When such obvious lies are pointed out, they fly into a wild rage.
That is the second characteristic.
I have personal experience of this.
When I was city desk editor, reporter Ishikawa Mizuho submitted a manuscript saying, “The poison gas photograph carried by the Asahi is fake.”
In the photograph, the “poison gas” was billowing up into the sky.
Poison gas crawls along the ground, flows into trenches, and kills enemy soldiers.
If it rises into the sky, it can kill only glass.
Moreover, there was also source evidence saying, “That was a scene from a river-crossing operation in central China, and what was emitted was a smoke screen.”
So the article “Asahi carried a fake photograph” appeared as the top story on the city news page.
The next day, Asahi’s department chief Satake Akimi came alone to storm the Sankei editorial department.
The managing editor and the city editor both fled, and I handled him alone, but Satake was truly angry, saying that the Asahi’s article was correct, that I was insolent, and that he would crush the Sankei.
When a complaint is made about an article, normally one investigates again.
He was not normal.
And normally, one does not storm into another office just because a complaint has been made.
This article continues.